We're going Zwift Racing in 2021

We’ve written quite a bit about how 2020 wasn’t what we expected. Needless to say the same holds true for the first few weeks of 2021. However there has been one pleasant surprise from the past few weeks: the team’s (re)discovery of Zwift racing.

Sure we have spent plenty of time racing Zwift in the past. We have even written about it on the Journal. But with IRL racing still on hold, and a new WTRL season kicking off, we have taken our Zwift racing to a new level over the past few weeks. Meaning more racers, a proper Discord Voice channel acting as race radio, and streaming on Twitch and Youtube.

All-in it has been a fun, if somewhat surprising ride. Here are some of our favorite parts of it:

Convincing our Team Coach of the Merits of Zwift Racing

It has been a bit quiet over in the structured training portion of the Journal, aka The Daily Grind. This silence doesn’t mean we’re done with our team coach, Mr Jacob Fetty - we’re still on Zoom coaching calls every week for what we jokingly call ‘family therapy time.’ But we’re definitely taking a more relaxed approach to structured training given we have no idea when IRL racing will resume.

And while we wait for the ‘real world’ to return to some sense of normalcy we have been slowly but surely dragging Fetty to endorse our Zwift racing escapades. He may have been somewhat skeptical at first - rightly so given some of the risks around intensity and fatigue. But he has definitely come around and now Zwift racing has a quasi prominent place in our TrainingPeaks schedules.

So we now get to spend part of our Monday night calls rehashing what happened in the prior week of virtual bike racing. If you asked us what 2021 would look like 12 months ago is this what we would have guessed? Virtual recaps of virtual races with virtual results? Probably not, but what a world to live in.

Recruiting a Very Special Directeur Sportif

We haven’t been doing much in the way of IRL team rides for reasons that should be obvious (hello COVID). But back in the day when we were riding together every single weekend Tom had a habit of absolutely terrorizing team rides. Meaning he would rip our legs off for hours at a time, barely breaking a sweat, while we hoped that he would eventually get tired (spoiler alert: he didn’t). As it turns out, this sort of fitness translated pretty well to Zwift, where Tom rapidly rose through the ranks and is now racing the Premier League.

So what did we do with one of the team’s best and most experienced Zwift racers? We convinced him to be our directeur sportif for our slightly less elite races in the B’s. Every single Tuesday Tom is on our Discord server, talking us through the courses - which he seems to know like the back of his hand - and coaching us on strategy in his now signature calm and collected voice. As Scott put it after his podium in this week’s race:

Tom talking us through the hard bits of races has been awesome. So many times I would have let the elastic snap but then Tom would chime in "Scott everyone in front of you is cooked"

Rebuilding our sense of Community

Without a doubt the best part of the Zwift team racing experience has been the sense of community it has helped foster while we’re all still isolated by COVID and unable to spend much time together IRL. Tom may have said it best on our team Slack:

Zwift is a social platform. And that is something that we all really need right now.

Sure, the framework for this social platform is racing. But results are only a small part of the experience. Really it is much more about the opportunity to spend time with teammates for an hour or two per week, even if its all done virtually. And with Discord Voice in the mix, Zwift races have really had the sound/feel of doing an actual team race - we’re talking strategy and cheering each other on throughout these events. We even added the team’s race radio to our latest stream:

In short, Zwift has been a great stand-in for team hangs, as we all wait to see when IRL hangs will be a thing. It’s not the perfect replacement, but its all we have right now thanks to COVID.

New Racers, New Problems

As Zwift racing has gained steam within the team, we have introduced a bunch of teammates to the pleasure and pain of Zwift racing. Occasional hilarity has ensued, including this past week when Russell misunderstood some guidance on trainer setup and wound up putting his KICKR on a % resistance mode. The result 30 seconds into the race?

“Russ is gone!”

"Good gone or bad gone?"

"Bad.. bad gone"

Yep, it turns out when you set your KICKR to a fixed resistance, it is pretty hard to stay in the field at the start of a Zwift race. Anyway, remember to pay attention to your trainer setup before your first race kids.

Mid-Race Zwift Software Glitches

Speaking of problems, we have experienced a few Zwift software glitches along the way - this time through no fault of our own! In perhaps the most memorable Cullen’s avatar somehow took a detour OFF the TTT course and wound up summitting Ventoux rather than finishing the time trial with the squad. Climbing Ventoux seems like an unwise detour - How and why did this happen? We have no clue but we did happen to catch it on stream: